Tag: london

From the moment you press the shutter a picture takes on a life which goes from your camera, to your darkroom (be it digital or chemical) where after being burnt and dodged (and in some cases bodged) it goes for printing. You do print your pictures don’t you? I have a hunch that with the advent of digital photography the vast majority of us leave our digital treasures gathering dust on our computer hard drives – I know I certainly do.

With the advent of photo management software, organising this digital soup has become a shedload easier and thanks to the power of programs like Lightroom and Aperture, the digital darkroom has finally come of age (it actually came of age a year or two ago, but I digress…). We are now able to push and tweak our photos so that they go from this:

to this:

The former, whilst nice hardly represents what I saw and felt when I took the picture – the latter however does, and certainly has the pizazz I need to justify printing the picture and hanging it on my wall. Which neatly segues to my topic – printing. Rather than go through the pain (and it is a pain) of keeping and maintaining a desk hogging, top notch inkjet, that requires the expense of cartridges and special photo-paper I prefer to let someone else deal with all that hassle.

Quite simply – taking pictures is what I like – picture printing – meh, I’ll let someone else do that for me.

Unfortunately being an anally-retentive perfectionist I needed someone truly high calibre to handle my printing (not that my pictures are that high calibre to be honest, but as the saying goes ‘if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right’). The big internet printers like Photobox I found to be good on price but not so good on quality so I was rather pleased when I discovered that one of the better printers, theprintspace can be found right here in London, and specialize in a particular type of printing called C-Type (or Type-C), which involves projecting the digital image onto light sensitive photographic paper rather than printing ink on paper. This apparently results in a higher quality, longer lasting print.

I chose to print the above macro image of a daisy as well as the following three pictures:

How did they turn out? Good – pretty damn good. (One thing I discovered, and no doubt my lack of experience is showing; the image needs to be sharpened more for printing than they do for on screen viewing – and not just a little but a fair amount). Now not only do theprintspace offer printing, they provide color calibrated workstations for you to prepare your print so that you can be sure that what you see on screen is what you get. And if that wasn’t enough they can mount the print onto card, mdf, plastic, aluminium and a bunch of other materials, with prices which aren’t too unreasonable. Now I’m not going to be sending hundreds of holiday snaps through them sure, but for the pictures I’ve taken which I feel are worth hanging up – only theprintspace will do.